Welcome to Limbo-land: working notice in Lockdown

In this, the latest of our occasional series of members’ blogs, Jen Evans discusses the effects of isolation one can feel in the final weeks of a job, in this case exacerbated by the Coronavirus outbreak…

Some readers may remember the floods in February (and the fires in Australia before that. Planet Earth is really being tested at the moment). My old office, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, was affected and so I’ve been working remotely since then. As such, I was already a bit isolated, but I was in the middle of committee preparations and needed to work with my team to deliver business-as-usual, as far as possible. It was a difficult and pressured time, but we got there. It was a great achievement.

I was then offered an exciting new role at the University of Bristol. I handed my notice in (two weeks before lockdown was announced) and set to work on my final list of tasks. Importantly, I wasn’t going to get involved in anything new and this turned out to be a real game changer.

Working my notice whilst based at home really compounded the isolation factor for me. There was little urgency since the deadline was fixed and the finite set of tasks were very specifically things that only I could do. I was ‘just finishing off’ and shaping my work for someone else to pick it up and carry on. Neither did I have the distraction of chatting to passing colleagues about my new job and sharing the countdown to my last day. It made the whole period rather more bleak than the usual excitement a new start inspires.

Added to this of course, was the Virus Factor. The nature of the impact on universities meant that the rest of the HE policy team were all of a sudden involved in a huge piece of work to determine where we could be lenient as a regulator and where we could support as a funder. They were talking to our sponsors in government and other sector partners across the UK; this was all-consuming, urgent and high impact work. I wasn’t involved in this and in stark contrast, my work was no longer on the radar. It would be dealt with in due course rather than at the next Council meeting. It rather took the shine away from my polishing off.

We also had two new team members join us in March and this brought mixed feelings for me. It was great to talk to people about what I was doing and to know the work I was finishing would be picked up by someone. However, it became clear through our chats, that the team as a whole were planning and organising future workload without me. New colleagues made reference to a new system and I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. It felt like yet another layer of isolation between me and the work that was going on. Of course, in a ‘normal’ world I’d hear all about these developments and be aware of them just by virtue of sitting in a shared office. In fact, I’d probably take great joy from not having to be involved. But instead, with three or four weeks of my employment left, I found myself feeling prematurely out of touch and excluded.

It’s difficult to describe the feeling of knowing that there is a lot going on around you, even though you can’t see it. I wasn’t involved in the meetings, or the briefings or the planning, but I could still sense the level of work and fervency going on behind the screens. Looking back, this really exacerbated the isolation I was feeling; rather than a gradual edging out of activities as would be normal in the office, working from home meant my involvement was cut-off quite abruptly. This obviously wasn’t intentional, but was simply the impact of remote working combined with the kind of work that the crisis required and the fact I was leaving the team.

I didn’t want my ARMA blog to be negative. I have simply tried to convey an honest reflection of how the situation has been for me. It is important to recognise that even the most enthusiastic among us struggle at times. And I’ve certainly learnt the value of keeping in touch with colleagues, and the importance of sharing information to maintain a level of office awareness which can avoid feelings of exclusion as well as of isolation.

Would you like to write a short Blog for ARMA? Send a brief precis to enquiries@arma.ac.uk and we may well be in touch!